13 ms·

FedEx shipping damage creates fractured artworks

352 points by talonx 6y ago

parsimo2010 6y ago
"Rather than thinking in terms of the Duchampian readymade, which is most often understood as operating iconically..." I got a real kick out of this line. At first I thought it was pure nonsense. After a bit of searching I found out that Marcel Duchamp was an artist that made some art called "readymades." Then I realized that what I thought was just pure nonsense was actually someone talking normally, but it was about a field totally alien to me.
- bobthepanda 6y ago
  For more context, Duchamp literally submitted a signed urinal to an art exhibition.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- dhritzkiv 6y ago
  That's quite interesting as I would consider Duchamp as modern art history 101 and his readymades are the prototypical examples of subversive art / anti-art.
  - bobthepanda 6y ago
    Given the state of arts funding at least in the US, and depending on how old you are, people tend to forget these things. The last art history class I took was my sophmore year of high school. I don't think it's unreasonable for someone to forget particulars if it's that long ago.
  - rrrrrrrrrrrryan 6y ago
    Duchamp's art also (arguably) marks the beginning of the transition from modernism to postmodernism - our current era. It's definitely modern, but it has little hints of postmodernism in it. I've never taken an art history class, but I do know of Duchamp, and I do think his name is known by anyone with even a passing curiosity with the world of art. The fact that he's relatively unknown here says a lot about the users of this site: highly knowledgeable folks, whose knowledge is probably much more specialized that they realize.
- woodruffw 6y ago
  > Then I realized that what I thought was just pure nonsense was actually someone talking normally, but it was about a field totally alien to me. I want to thank you for commenting on this. It's been said before, but: technologists have a tendency to attempt and derive every other field from their own first principles and, when they fail to do so, discount fields as "pure nonsense." We all (non-technologists included) benefit from not falling into that mode of thought.
  - Chris2048 6y ago
    Do you have any evidence of this tendency outside of SV?
    - snakeboy 6y ago
      What exactly are you expecting OP to provide as satisfactory evidence here? Anything anyone says is gonna be anecdotal. Personally, probably a solid third of the guys I knew in a college CS program were insufferably close-minded and reductionist about non-"hard stem" fields of study.
      - AndrewKemendo 6y ago
        >What exactly are you expecting OP to provide as satisfactory evidence here? I like how this is phrased. It's a more pithy question than the one I generally use with people who have loosely defined interrogatives or claims, which is: "What proof would you need to make you believe otherwise"
      - thanhhaimai 6y ago
        To be fair, a lot of people I know who are outside of stem also don't view non-stem fields in a shiny light. It's not a phenomenal inside CS. We as a society value stem fields higher and pay them more on average.
      - notJim 6y ago
        I studied aerospace engineering and the same was true. I suspect it's the case in many engineering and science fields.
- grenoire 6y ago
  Sometimes I read expert-written blog posts or articles, targeted at a demographic the author is familiar in communicating with. My brain will literally just turn off and I will go into a reading trance where I don't understand the text because my brain simply says 'yeah this is nonsense, don't get it.' Very interesting phenomenon.
  - abathur 6y ago
    When I was working on my MFA thesis, I came to a realization that feels like it might overlap with what you're describing. It's a little hard to put a bow on the idea (and why it isn't trite...) at this length, but basically: I felt a connection between the experience of trying to parse some intentionally difficult/impenetrable ~modernist texts, and the experience of trying to parse older texts where the phrasing is dated. They're too unfamiliar to parse with fluent ease, and the experience of fluent reading is just fundamentally different. In one case, the text is like a Rubik's cube, and in the other it's hard to even realize it exists separately from your instantaneous understanding of it.
- ashtonkem 6y ago
  It's also important to understand the context of any artistic movement. Dadaism was a response to futurism and other pro-industrial artistic movements that were very popular during the lead up to WW1. Dadaists were part of an artistic recoiling from the horrors of WW1 and anything that even smacked of the sentiments that were felt to have lead up to such a catastrophe. This far from WW1, the whole thing seems a bit silly because we're not part of the time and mental place that made such movements tick originally.
- StavrosK 6y ago
  To be fair, it is pretentious writing. Who uses "Duchampian" instead of "Duchamp's"? That paragraph can be written much more simply without losing any nuance.
  - nulbyte 6y ago
    I would imagine there is considerable intersection between people who say Duchampian with people who say Orwellian, Freudian, or Kafkaesque. It seems to me a fairly normal English construction.
    - StavrosK 6y ago
      It depends on the context, you wouldn't say "I read an Orwellian novel" when talking about 1984.
      - hamburglar 6y ago
        Of course you wouldn't, because being Orwell, it's Orwellian by definition. But you could call another author's book Orwellian. Just as the quote in question was probably referring to things that are Duchamp-like, as opposed to just Duchamp's.
      - datameta 6y ago
        One can imagine a context where the qualities referenced aren't specific or limited to 1984. In such a case it would be perfectly apt to reference Orwell's writing style or body of ideas more globally.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - tomjakubowski 6y ago
    Duchamp's readymade and Duchampian readymade don't mean the same thing. A skilled imitator could create a Duchampian readymade, but it wouldn't be Duchamp's work. https://www.perrotin.com/artists/Maurizio_Cattelan/2/another-fucking-readymade/5486 https://www.perrotin.com/artists/Maurizio_Cattelan/2/another...
- manigandham 6y ago
  That's how any field would be if you don't know the jargon, history and technicalities. Is it the fact that it's art that led your first thought to consider it "pure nonsense"?
  - sharkweek 6y ago
    If I listen to my psychologist friend talk with their other psychologist friends about the DSM it’s total gibberish to me. Same goes for anytime I need any work done on my car other than an oil change.
- BenoitEssiambre 6y ago
  They kind of had to mention Duchamp since the artwork is slightly derivative of one of Duchamp's famous artwork which features glass panes broken during transport: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wuf_GHmjxLM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wuf_GHmjxLM
- 30minAdayHN 6y ago
  This was also the case while prepping for GRE. I realized that reading comprehension questions were hard because the passages were referring to completely alien concepts which I had no intuitive comprehension of. I used to totally screw up when passages were referring to art, finance, culture etc. Realized that I should develop comfort in understanding remote fields, not necessarily just the vocabulary. I spent a lot of time reading articles from very diverse areas which I thought ultimately helped handling them better. I immediately realized that is the case even here when I read that quoted line. In my case, when I read such things, I just skim past them. It takes some effort to slow down and actually dig a bit more to form the understanding.
- ska 6y ago
  Every field has it's own jargon and natural/comfortable modes of expression. Pretty interesting things can happen at the boundaries between fields, when you are trying to translate.
- cronix 6y ago
  I believe this is similar to the Gell-Mann Amnesia affect. > In essence, people recognise that the media gets virtually everything wrong in media reports they know something about but credulously accept media accounts about everything else where they actually themselves know nothing. https://lawofmarkets.com/2020/04/13/the-gell-mann-effect/ https://lawofmarkets.com/2020/04/13/the-gell-mann-effect/
mmastrac 6y ago
This seems unlikely - you can register an exact dimension? > As for the corporate dimension, I was aware that standard FedEx boxes are SSCC coded (serial shipping container code), a code that is held by FedEx and excludes other shippers from registering a box with the same dimensions. In other words, the size of an official FedEx box, not just its design, is proprietary; it is a volume of space which is a property exclusive to FedEx.
- sparky_z 6y ago
  Yeah, that jumped out at me too. What could possibly be the reason for that? Who would enforce it?
  - rgovostes 6y ago
    The USPS gives out flat-rate boxes for free. The assumption is of course that they'll recuperate the cost when you buy postage. But I have wondered if FedEx would accept a USPS box, and this "proprietary box size" thing makes me think no.
    - Alupis 6y ago
      The USPS flat rate packaging actually says "Property of United States Postal Service. Misuse of this packaging is unlawful", or something to that end.
      - wyldfire 6y ago
        While that might cause the USPS dismay, the question was whether FedEx would accept/ship the package. Would FedEx reject the package for fear of frustrating USPS?
        jeromegv 6y ago
        Canadian perspective, I have used those boxes within the Canadian system with Canada Post. This law is not applicable in Canada so once those USPS box make it all the way here, there's nothing they can do to prevent it from being used.
rootsudo 6y ago
It seems fantastic, I love the idea and goes to show how out of touch something can become by involving multiple people/workflow, etc.
dougmwne 6y ago
Interesting! It's not really about the glass cube, but about the shipping process and what that shipping process does to the things it ships. It highlights the brutality and scale well. It's almost like a QA relic put on display. I wonder if there would be other good examples.
- lisper 6y ago
  It's also -- importantly IMHO -- about the fact that the dimensions of Fedex shipping boxes are proprietary. (Assuming that's actually true. I'm a little skeptical. But that's what the article claims.)
  - musingsole 6y ago
    The project then seems to embody how FedEx treats its own space. It'd be nice to find a megacorp that treats its tools with love.
    - s1artibartfast 6y ago
      I’m not sure what you mean by space or tools. I think someone could see this work as a dig at fedex package handling, but personally think this is a pretty shallow take. For me it is a window into the world of package transportation that few are aware of. this is probably biased by my background, having worked for a megacorp with an entire department dedicated to packaging design and validation. it even included glass fracture experts that could write 100 pages on one of those boxes!
aketchum 6y ago
The thing I love about modern art is that initial instinctive reaction of "Anyone could do this!". I have absolutely zero training in art so this might be a infantile opinion, but I am delighted by the pieces that makes me realize "Anyone could do this, but no-one did until now." All that to say, I really like this series of works.
- Waterluvian 6y ago
  This might be your whole point, but what your comment inspired in me was the excitement that art is accessible to anyone. That we're not out of "easy ideas" with only "hard ideas" left. Which touches on one of the disenchanting things about technology (that is probably not actually true, but how I feel): it feels like we've only got "hard ideas" left, most accessible to the experts, those with resources, those with a lot of time.
- beamatronic 6y ago
  There are layers of meaning here - truly a reflection of modern times.
  - ableal 6y ago
    This may be the starting point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fountain_(Duchamp) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fountain_(Duchamp)
- teawrecks 6y ago
  Yeah, but for a lot of modern art, I think the claim many people are making is both that "anyone could do it" and "people already have and just didn't make a big deal of it". Ex. When people say "my kid could paint that" they mean "something very similar to that is already hanging on my refrigerator".
  - andmarios 6y ago
    I think they couldn't really. If you look into modern artists they are extremelly talented and their unique style that seems like _anyone could do it_ comes in later stages in their life. It's a bit like coding, where simple and elegant solutions only come to you after you reach a certain level. People looking into your work might think that the solution is simple enough that even a junior could do it, but it's not the case. It takes another good engineer to spot one. :)
BenFeldman1930 6y ago
I wonder if the works fall under copyright laws, when the result does not depend on artist intervention.
- kube-system 6y ago
  IANAL, but I would think the artist would have copyright as normal for a couple of reasons —- the involvement FedEx did was for hire —- and FedEx’s actions were used as tool in creating the work that they didn’t even know was being created. The artist still caused it to be created.
- tiborsaas 6y ago
  The artist did the initial move to ship the box with the intention that the handling process will produce some features. Since the handlers were unaware of this, it's not much different from rolling the box down a hill.
kuter 6y ago
Reminds me of the Japanese art Kintsugi/kintsukuroi which is the name for repairing broken pottery with lacquer and gold silver or platinum powder. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kintsugi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kintsugi
- metalliqaz 6y ago
  I think it's the opposite of that.
  - danparsonson 6y ago
    The opposite of something can still evoke the thing it opposes :-)
  - kuter 6y ago
    Visually they look similar.
luisfmh 6y ago
It would be so cool if they did not just shipping to art galleries, but also mass produced it so you could get your own fedex shipping box art at home.
- comboy 6y ago
  That is a great idea. It has some appeal. Prepare it from some thin sheet of glass but on something which will hold it together, maybe add some fluids separated in a ways that are easy to destroy with acceleration. You receive something that nobody else saw before and completely unique. With interesting enough design people would be posting pictures of these so you have marketing covered. And then there are returned products: "My item was not damaged at all"
  - dawnerd 6y ago
    Or just laminate the glass?
    - comboy 6y ago
      Yeah but I mean it would be nice if you could have some kaleidoscopic effect. Or something like a Rorschach test. Just broken glass won't go viral.
      - dawnerd 6y ago
        Ooo, I gotcha, that would be pretty slick. Kind of like those sandscape decorations that you flip over?
        comboy 6y ago
        Exactly, present randomness to people and they will find some patterns. Even if 1 in 100 is interesting, those are the one that end up on social media doing the marketing. Kind of evil that way. But I think some people want what others don't have.
biztos 6y ago
As an artist, and one of the many who studied Duchamp in school, I love these. But I wonder if they aren’t potentially endangering the FedEx workers who transport them. Is there not some danger of getting a shard of glass sticking through the box? The obvious Duchamp reference here by the way is not to his readymades but to his Large Glass: https://smarthistory.org/duchamp-largeglass/ https://smarthistory.org/duchamp-largeglass/
- ansible 6y ago
  I was worried about something similar. I was wondering if the artist at least applied some tape or something to the inside surfaces of the glass to prevent the shards from separating.
legerdemain 6y ago
FedEx owns the box design and dimensions that these glass pieces explicitly imitate. FedEx also significantly contributes to the value of these pieces by applying unique and creative forms of rough handling during shipment. Does FedEx own this art, and should the credited individual be paying them a share of the money earned from its display?
- EForEndeavour 6y ago
  > Does FedEx own this art Do the producers of brushes, paints, and canvases own any of the art that their products make possible? Does the owner of an art gallery own the photos I take during my paid visit?
  - legerdemain 6y ago
    > Does the owner of an art gallery own the photos I take during my paid visit? Yes? Paying for a ticket does not grant you a license to reproduce the art.
    - EForEndeavour 6y ago
      Does the act of paying for admission sign away my rights to the photos I take while inside?
      - butt_hugger 6y ago
        Most often yes, but it depends on the gallery. The ones that have the big "no photography" signs are a giveaway.
      - kevincox 6y ago
        You may well own the photo but not the subject of the photo. I believe this means that you can not sell the photo without also acquiring a license to the subject. I imagine that this is the same as taking a photo of a stock image. That doesn't make any sense. Reminds me of why you can't take a photo of the Eiffel Tower at night. https://youtu.be/M16CGK1T9MM https://youtu.be/M16CGK1T9MM
Blikkentrekker 6y ago
Personally, I judge art purely on the final result by principle and refuse to consider the artist itself, his stated intent, or the process by which he made it, as well as the source material whereupon it might be based: — it must stand on it's own merit. In this particular case I find the cracks to not be terribly unæsthetic but not spectacular either, and consider it largely an inferior form of Wabi-Sabi design. I do not like how much the art world is about the artist rather than the art itself, and how a story must accommodate it such as the novel production technique of shipping it as such. It is essentially a world of hero worship where one's name is more important than one's productions.
- vaughnegut 6y ago
  In fairness, removing the context from art removes a lot its value. This would be akin to reading Animal Farm and ignoring its allegory about Communism and judging it purely on its merit as a story about some animals staging a revolution. This is also like reading Shakespeare in high school without one of those copies that explain a lot of the jokes and references that aren't obvious to the reading 500 years later. Context is what gives art a lot of its power, the downside is that you need this context to understand it. I'm not a huge art person so I view most art superficially, but always enjoy when I get an opportunity to learn more.
  - Blikkentrekker 6y ago
    > In fairness, removing the context from art removes a lot its value. It removes the value for the unobjective man who cannot free himself of such biases and judge matters on their own merit. > This would be akin to reading Animal Farm and ignoring its allegory about Communism and judging it purely on its merit as a story about some animals staging a revolution. No, it would be akin to reading animal farm without knowing anything about the auctor, or the conditions and process by which it was written. Art providing a commentary on an external event, and being judged upon how well it does so is an entirely different matter. Of course, the artist can also be considered if what the art attempt to do is to provide some kind of commentary on it's own artist. The argument you raise here is tantamount to that refusing to consider the auctor of a physics paper as well as how the research came to be in judging it's merit, is tantamount to not considering how well the physical results in it model the physical realities they attempt to describe. > This is also like reading Shakespeare in high school without one of those copies that explain a lot of the jokes and references that aren't obvious to the reading 500 years later. And this is exactly why I believe judging Shakespeare by modern readers is prætentious. A modern reader can never truly have Sprachgefühl for 1500s English. He may be able to read it, but it's hard for him to truly be capable of assessing whether language truly sounds beautiful. > Context is what gives art a lot of its power, the downside is that you need this context to understand it. I'm not a huge art person so I view most art superficially, but always enjoy when I get an opportunity to learn more. It is what gives art power to the unobjective, biased man who cannot compartimentalize and judge matters on their own merit. This does not limit itself to art. You will find that the same same man who judges art by the artist, will also easily be convinced that the exact same dish tastes better, if he be told it was more expensive.
tyingq 6y ago
"As for the corporate dimension, I was aware that standard FedEx boxes are SSCC coded (serial shipping container code), a code that is held by FedEx and excludes other shippers from registering a box with the same dimensions" Surely that's not right? What value is brought by only allowing one entity to register a 10"x2"x8" box, for example?
theklub 6y ago
Well this is hacker news and I’d consider this an art hack.
JALTU 6y ago
Every once in a while, I see art I really wish I had thought of...especially as a non-STEM major who has a high affinity for applied STEM stuff.
mlindner 6y ago
> And each time the work is shipped — say from one gallery to another — it’s unwittingly altered further by a system created by a massive multinational corporation: Methinks the writer of this article has a chip on their shoulder or someone hurt them.
minikomi 6y ago
Reminds me of this olifur eliasson piece: https://olafureliasson.net/archive/artwork/WEK110935/memories-from-the-critical-zone-germanypolandrussiachinajapan-no-1#slideshow https://olafureliasson.net/archive/artwork/WEK110935/memorie... > Most of the artworks in Sometimes the river is the bridge were shipped by surface transport from Berlin to Tokyo to reduce the exhibition’s carbon footprint. Drawings were produced by a chance process that unfolded while the artworks were travelling by truck, train, and boat along their route. In each set-up, a ballpoint pen was held by a mechanical arm so that it moved over the surface of the paper in response to the movements of the crate, producing a visual record of the terrain over which the artworks passed. Delightfully recursive in that the exhibition of the artwork creates the art being exhibited.. neither would exist without the other.
bartread 6y ago
I'm going to be that guy. I can't help myself. This is fine for making art, and this is a really fun project that I enjoyed a lot. But... I've seen enough unboxings of damaged goods, and ropey packaging over the years that has similarly led to damage here in real life, that it seems worth saying even amongst an intelligent crowd: the thickness of a cardboard box is not in any way sufficient to protect any goods more valuable than a book/DVD/video game/CD jewel case[0] during shipping, let alone fragile goods. You need to make sure that you buy a box that's big enough to hold whatever you're sending, plus all the padding you're going to pack all around it to prevent it from being damaged by knocks or being dropped. This will add to the weight and size of your package, and therefore the cost of shipping, but it's worth it to ensure your goods arrive undamaged at their destination. </thatguymode> [0] Even this one is debatable given how easy these are to crack and prone they are to the hinge tabs snapping off. The CD jewel case is a wildly successful design but not, I would argue, a great design - certainly not a great design for the particularly brittle plastic they're made out of. Ironic considering the discs themselves are made out of polycarbonate, and are therefore fairly durable.
- mmastrac 6y ago
  Ugh, I had so many jewel cases break in so many ways: - cracked case - cracked hinge - those teeth break off
- andreareina 6y ago
  When I was embedded in that world, the rule was that whatever was inside had to survive being dropped a few (3?) feet.
chmod775 6y ago
> As for the corporate dimension, I was aware that standard FedEx boxes are SSCC coded (serial shipping container code), a code that is held by FedEx and excludes other shippers from registering a box with the same dimensions. I wonder if this is true, because if so it would be a particularly ridiculous example of "intellectual property". Anecdotally I have read a few of these art PR-pieces where such details were made up.

352 points by talonx 6y ago

parsimo2010 6y ago

"Rather than thinking in terms of the Duchampian readymade, which is most often understood as operating iconically..." I got a real kick out of this line. At first I thought it was pure nonsense. After a bit of searching I found out that Marcel Duchamp was an artist that made some art called "readymades." Then I realized that what I thought was just pure nonsense was actually someone talking normally, but it was about a field totally alien to me.

bobthepanda 6y ago
For more context, Duchamp literally submitted a signed urinal to an art exhibition.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
dhritzkiv 6y ago
That's quite interesting as I would consider Duchamp as modern art history 101 and his readymades are the prototypical examples of subversive art / anti-art.
- bobthepanda 6y ago
  Given the state of arts funding at least in the US, and depending on how old you are, people tend to forget these things. The last art history class I took was my sophmore year of high school. I don't think it's unreasonable for someone to forget particulars if it's that long ago.
- rrrrrrrrrrrryan 6y ago
  Duchamp's art also (arguably) marks the beginning of the transition from modernism to postmodernism - our current era. It's definitely modern, but it has little hints of postmodernism in it. I've never taken an art history class, but I do know of Duchamp, and I do think his name is known by anyone with even a passing curiosity with the world of art. The fact that he's relatively unknown here says a lot about the users of this site: highly knowledgeable folks, whose knowledge is probably much more specialized that they realize.
woodruffw 6y ago
> Then I realized that what I thought was just pure nonsense was actually someone talking normally, but it was about a field totally alien to me. I want to thank you for commenting on this. It's been said before, but: technologists have a tendency to attempt and derive every other field from their own first principles and, when they fail to do so, discount fields as "pure nonsense." We all (non-technologists included) benefit from not falling into that mode of thought.
- Chris2048 6y ago
  Do you have any evidence of this tendency outside of SV?
  - snakeboy 6y ago
    What exactly are you expecting OP to provide as satisfactory evidence here? Anything anyone says is gonna be anecdotal. Personally, probably a solid third of the guys I knew in a college CS program were insufferably close-minded and reductionist about non-"hard stem" fields of study.
    - AndrewKemendo 6y ago
      >What exactly are you expecting OP to provide as satisfactory evidence here? I like how this is phrased. It's a more pithy question than the one I generally use with people who have loosely defined interrogatives or claims, which is: "What proof would you need to make you believe otherwise"
    - thanhhaimai 6y ago
      To be fair, a lot of people I know who are outside of stem also don't view non-stem fields in a shiny light. It's not a phenomenal inside CS. We as a society value stem fields higher and pay them more on average.
    - notJim 6y ago
      I studied aerospace engineering and the same was true. I suspect it's the case in many engineering and science fields.
grenoire 6y ago
Sometimes I read expert-written blog posts or articles, targeted at a demographic the author is familiar in communicating with. My brain will literally just turn off and I will go into a reading trance where I don't understand the text because my brain simply says 'yeah this is nonsense, don't get it.' Very interesting phenomenon.
- abathur 6y ago
  When I was working on my MFA thesis, I came to a realization that feels like it might overlap with what you're describing. It's a little hard to put a bow on the idea (and why it isn't trite...) at this length, but basically: I felt a connection between the experience of trying to parse some intentionally difficult/impenetrable ~modernist texts, and the experience of trying to parse older texts where the phrasing is dated. They're too unfamiliar to parse with fluent ease, and the experience of fluent reading is just fundamentally different. In one case, the text is like a Rubik's cube, and in the other it's hard to even realize it exists separately from your instantaneous understanding of it.
ashtonkem 6y ago
It's also important to understand the context of any artistic movement. Dadaism was a response to futurism and other pro-industrial artistic movements that were very popular during the lead up to WW1. Dadaists were part of an artistic recoiling from the horrors of WW1 and anything that even smacked of the sentiments that were felt to have lead up to such a catastrophe. This far from WW1, the whole thing seems a bit silly because we're not part of the time and mental place that made such movements tick originally.
StavrosK 6y ago
To be fair, it is pretentious writing. Who uses "Duchampian" instead of "Duchamp's"? That paragraph can be written much more simply without losing any nuance.
- nulbyte 6y ago
  I would imagine there is considerable intersection between people who say Duchampian with people who say Orwellian, Freudian, or Kafkaesque. It seems to me a fairly normal English construction.
  - StavrosK 6y ago
    It depends on the context, you wouldn't say "I read an Orwellian novel" when talking about 1984.
    - hamburglar 6y ago
      Of course you wouldn't, because being Orwell, it's Orwellian by definition. But you could call another author's book Orwellian. Just as the quote in question was probably referring to things that are Duchamp-like, as opposed to just Duchamp's.
    - datameta 6y ago
      One can imagine a context where the qualities referenced aren't specific or limited to 1984. In such a case it would be perfectly apt to reference Orwell's writing style or body of ideas more globally.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- tomjakubowski 6y ago
  Duchamp's readymade and Duchampian readymade don't mean the same thing. A skilled imitator could create a Duchampian readymade, but it wouldn't be Duchamp's work. https://www.perrotin.com/artists/Maurizio_Cattelan/2/another-fucking-readymade/5486 https://www.perrotin.com/artists/Maurizio_Cattelan/2/another...
manigandham 6y ago
That's how any field would be if you don't know the jargon, history and technicalities. Is it the fact that it's art that led your first thought to consider it "pure nonsense"?
- sharkweek 6y ago
  If I listen to my psychologist friend talk with their other psychologist friends about the DSM it’s total gibberish to me. Same goes for anytime I need any work done on my car other than an oil change.
BenoitEssiambre 6y ago
They kind of had to mention Duchamp since the artwork is slightly derivative of one of Duchamp's famous artwork which features glass panes broken during transport: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wuf_GHmjxLM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wuf_GHmjxLM
30minAdayHN 6y ago
This was also the case while prepping for GRE. I realized that reading comprehension questions were hard because the passages were referring to completely alien concepts which I had no intuitive comprehension of. I used to totally screw up when passages were referring to art, finance, culture etc. Realized that I should develop comfort in understanding remote fields, not necessarily just the vocabulary. I spent a lot of time reading articles from very diverse areas which I thought ultimately helped handling them better. I immediately realized that is the case even here when I read that quoted line. In my case, when I read such things, I just skim past them. It takes some effort to slow down and actually dig a bit more to form the understanding.
ska 6y ago
Every field has it's own jargon and natural/comfortable modes of expression. Pretty interesting things can happen at the boundaries between fields, when you are trying to translate.
cronix 6y ago
I believe this is similar to the Gell-Mann Amnesia affect. > In essence, people recognise that the media gets virtually everything wrong in media reports they know something about but credulously accept media accounts about everything else where they actually themselves know nothing. https://lawofmarkets.com/2020/04/13/the-gell-mann-effect/ https://lawofmarkets.com/2020/04/13/the-gell-mann-effect/

mmastrac 6y ago

This seems unlikely - you can register an exact dimension? > As for the corporate dimension, I was aware that standard FedEx boxes are SSCC coded (serial shipping container code), a code that is held by FedEx and excludes other shippers from registering a box with the same dimensions. In other words, the size of an official FedEx box, not just its design, is proprietary; it is a volume of space which is a property exclusive to FedEx.

sparky_z 6y ago
Yeah, that jumped out at me too. What could possibly be the reason for that? Who would enforce it?
- rgovostes 6y ago
  The USPS gives out flat-rate boxes for free. The assumption is of course that they'll recuperate the cost when you buy postage. But I have wondered if FedEx would accept a USPS box, and this "proprietary box size" thing makes me think no.
  - Alupis 6y ago
    The USPS flat rate packaging actually says "Property of United States Postal Service. Misuse of this packaging is unlawful", or something to that end.
    - wyldfire 6y ago
      While that might cause the USPS dismay, the question was whether FedEx would accept/ship the package. Would FedEx reject the package for fear of frustrating USPS?
      - jeromegv 6y ago
        Canadian perspective, I have used those boxes within the Canadian system with Canada Post. This law is not applicable in Canada so once those USPS box make it all the way here, there's nothing they can do to prevent it from being used.

rootsudo 6y ago

It seems fantastic, I love the idea and goes to show how out of touch something can become by involving multiple people/workflow, etc.

dougmwne 6y ago

Interesting! It's not really about the glass cube, but about the shipping process and what that shipping process does to the things it ships. It highlights the brutality and scale well. It's almost like a QA relic put on display. I wonder if there would be other good examples.

lisper 6y ago
It's also -- importantly IMHO -- about the fact that the dimensions of Fedex shipping boxes are proprietary. (Assuming that's actually true. I'm a little skeptical. But that's what the article claims.)
- musingsole 6y ago
  The project then seems to embody how FedEx treats its own space. It'd be nice to find a megacorp that treats its tools with love.
  - s1artibartfast 6y ago
    I’m not sure what you mean by space or tools. I think someone could see this work as a dig at fedex package handling, but personally think this is a pretty shallow take. For me it is a window into the world of package transportation that few are aware of. this is probably biased by my background, having worked for a megacorp with an entire department dedicated to packaging design and validation. it even included glass fracture experts that could write 100 pages on one of those boxes!

aketchum 6y ago

The thing I love about modern art is that initial instinctive reaction of "Anyone could do this!". I have absolutely zero training in art so this might be a infantile opinion, but I am delighted by the pieces that makes me realize "Anyone could do this, but no-one did until now." All that to say, I really like this series of works.

Waterluvian 6y ago
This might be your whole point, but what your comment inspired in me was the excitement that art is accessible to anyone. That we're not out of "easy ideas" with only "hard ideas" left. Which touches on one of the disenchanting things about technology (that is probably not actually true, but how I feel): it feels like we've only got "hard ideas" left, most accessible to the experts, those with resources, those with a lot of time.
beamatronic 6y ago
There are layers of meaning here - truly a reflection of modern times.
- ableal 6y ago
  This may be the starting point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fountain_(Duchamp) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fountain_(Duchamp)
teawrecks 6y ago
Yeah, but for a lot of modern art, I think the claim many people are making is both that "anyone could do it" and "people already have and just didn't make a big deal of it". Ex. When people say "my kid could paint that" they mean "something very similar to that is already hanging on my refrigerator".
- andmarios 6y ago
  I think they couldn't really. If you look into modern artists they are extremelly talented and their unique style that seems like _anyone could do it_ comes in later stages in their life. It's a bit like coding, where simple and elegant solutions only come to you after you reach a certain level. People looking into your work might think that the solution is simple enough that even a junior could do it, but it's not the case. It takes another good engineer to spot one. :)

BenFeldman1930 6y ago

I wonder if the works fall under copyright laws, when the result does not depend on artist intervention.

kube-system 6y ago
IANAL, but I would think the artist would have copyright as normal for a couple of reasons —- the involvement FedEx did was for hire —- and FedEx’s actions were used as tool in creating the work that they didn’t even know was being created. The artist still caused it to be created.
tiborsaas 6y ago
The artist did the initial move to ship the box with the intention that the handling process will produce some features. Since the handlers were unaware of this, it's not much different from rolling the box down a hill.

kuter 6y ago

Reminds me of the Japanese art Kintsugi/kintsukuroi which is the name for repairing broken pottery with lacquer and gold silver or platinum powder. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kintsugi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kintsugi

metalliqaz 6y ago
I think it's the opposite of that.
- danparsonson 6y ago
  The opposite of something can still evoke the thing it opposes :-)
- kuter 6y ago
  Visually they look similar.

luisfmh 6y ago

It would be so cool if they did not just shipping to art galleries, but also mass produced it so you could get your own fedex shipping box art at home.

comboy 6y ago
That is a great idea. It has some appeal. Prepare it from some thin sheet of glass but on something which will hold it together, maybe add some fluids separated in a ways that are easy to destroy with acceleration. You receive something that nobody else saw before and completely unique. With interesting enough design people would be posting pictures of these so you have marketing covered. And then there are returned products: "My item was not damaged at all"
- dawnerd 6y ago
  Or just laminate the glass?
  - comboy 6y ago
    Yeah but I mean it would be nice if you could have some kaleidoscopic effect. Or something like a Rorschach test. Just broken glass won't go viral.
    - dawnerd 6y ago
      Ooo, I gotcha, that would be pretty slick. Kind of like those sandscape decorations that you flip over?
      - comboy 6y ago
        Exactly, present randomness to people and they will find some patterns. Even if 1 in 100 is interesting, those are the one that end up on social media doing the marketing. Kind of evil that way. But I think some people want what others don't have.

biztos 6y ago

As an artist, and one of the many who studied Duchamp in school, I love these. But I wonder if they aren’t potentially endangering the FedEx workers who transport them. Is there not some danger of getting a shard of glass sticking through the box? The obvious Duchamp reference here by the way is not to his readymades but to his Large Glass: https://smarthistory.org/duchamp-largeglass/ https://smarthistory.org/duchamp-largeglass/

ansible 6y ago
I was worried about something similar. I was wondering if the artist at least applied some tape or something to the inside surfaces of the glass to prevent the shards from separating.

legerdemain 6y ago

FedEx owns the box design and dimensions that these glass pieces explicitly imitate. FedEx also significantly contributes to the value of these pieces by applying unique and creative forms of rough handling during shipment. Does FedEx own this art, and should the credited individual be paying them a share of the money earned from its display?

EForEndeavour 6y ago
> Does FedEx own this art Do the producers of brushes, paints, and canvases own any of the art that their products make possible? Does the owner of an art gallery own the photos I take during my paid visit?
- legerdemain 6y ago
  > Does the owner of an art gallery own the photos I take during my paid visit? Yes? Paying for a ticket does not grant you a license to reproduce the art.
  - EForEndeavour 6y ago
    Does the act of paying for admission sign away my rights to the photos I take while inside?
    - butt_hugger 6y ago
      Most often yes, but it depends on the gallery. The ones that have the big "no photography" signs are a giveaway.
    - kevincox 6y ago
      You may well own the photo but not the subject of the photo. I believe this means that you can not sell the photo without also acquiring a license to the subject. I imagine that this is the same as taking a photo of a stock image. That doesn't make any sense. Reminds me of why you can't take a photo of the Eiffel Tower at night. https://youtu.be/M16CGK1T9MM https://youtu.be/M16CGK1T9MM

Blikkentrekker 6y ago

Personally, I judge art purely on the final result by principle and refuse to consider the artist itself, his stated intent, or the process by which he made it, as well as the source material whereupon it might be based: — it must stand on it's own merit. In this particular case I find the cracks to not be terribly unæsthetic but not spectacular either, and consider it largely an inferior form of Wabi-Sabi design. I do not like how much the art world is about the artist rather than the art itself, and how a story must accommodate it such as the novel production technique of shipping it as such. It is essentially a world of hero worship where one's name is more important than one's productions.

vaughnegut 6y ago
In fairness, removing the context from art removes a lot its value. This would be akin to reading Animal Farm and ignoring its allegory about Communism and judging it purely on its merit as a story about some animals staging a revolution. This is also like reading Shakespeare in high school without one of those copies that explain a lot of the jokes and references that aren't obvious to the reading 500 years later. Context is what gives art a lot of its power, the downside is that you need this context to understand it. I'm not a huge art person so I view most art superficially, but always enjoy when I get an opportunity to learn more.
- Blikkentrekker 6y ago
  > In fairness, removing the context from art removes a lot its value. It removes the value for the unobjective man who cannot free himself of such biases and judge matters on their own merit. > This would be akin to reading Animal Farm and ignoring its allegory about Communism and judging it purely on its merit as a story about some animals staging a revolution. No, it would be akin to reading animal farm without knowing anything about the auctor, or the conditions and process by which it was written. Art providing a commentary on an external event, and being judged upon how well it does so is an entirely different matter. Of course, the artist can also be considered if what the art attempt to do is to provide some kind of commentary on it's own artist. The argument you raise here is tantamount to that refusing to consider the auctor of a physics paper as well as how the research came to be in judging it's merit, is tantamount to not considering how well the physical results in it model the physical realities they attempt to describe. > This is also like reading Shakespeare in high school without one of those copies that explain a lot of the jokes and references that aren't obvious to the reading 500 years later. And this is exactly why I believe judging Shakespeare by modern readers is prætentious. A modern reader can never truly have Sprachgefühl for 1500s English. He may be able to read it, but it's hard for him to truly be capable of assessing whether language truly sounds beautiful. > Context is what gives art a lot of its power, the downside is that you need this context to understand it. I'm not a huge art person so I view most art superficially, but always enjoy when I get an opportunity to learn more. It is what gives art power to the unobjective, biased man who cannot compartimentalize and judge matters on their own merit. This does not limit itself to art. You will find that the same same man who judges art by the artist, will also easily be convinced that the exact same dish tastes better, if he be told it was more expensive.

tyingq 6y ago

"As for the corporate dimension, I was aware that standard FedEx boxes are SSCC coded (serial shipping container code), a code that is held by FedEx and excludes other shippers from registering a box with the same dimensions" Surely that's not right? What value is brought by only allowing one entity to register a 10"x2"x8" box, for example?

theklub 6y ago

Well this is hacker news and I’d consider this an art hack.

JALTU 6y ago

Every once in a while, I see art I really wish I had thought of...especially as a non-STEM major who has a high affinity for applied STEM stuff.

mlindner 6y ago

> And each time the work is shipped — say from one gallery to another — it’s unwittingly altered further by a system created by a massive multinational corporation: Methinks the writer of this article has a chip on their shoulder or someone hurt them.

minikomi 6y ago

Reminds me of this olifur eliasson piece: https://olafureliasson.net/archive/artwork/WEK110935/memories-from-the-critical-zone-germanypolandrussiachinajapan-no-1#slideshow https://olafureliasson.net/archive/artwork/WEK110935/memorie... > Most of the artworks in Sometimes the river is the bridge were shipped by surface transport from Berlin to Tokyo to reduce the exhibition’s carbon footprint. Drawings were produced by a chance process that unfolded while the artworks were travelling by truck, train, and boat along their route. In each set-up, a ballpoint pen was held by a mechanical arm so that it moved over the surface of the paper in response to the movements of the crate, producing a visual record of the terrain over which the artworks passed. Delightfully recursive in that the exhibition of the artwork creates the art being exhibited.. neither would exist without the other.

bartread 6y ago

I'm going to be that guy. I can't help myself. This is fine for making art, and this is a really fun project that I enjoyed a lot. But... I've seen enough unboxings of damaged goods, and ropey packaging over the years that has similarly led to damage here in real life, that it seems worth saying even amongst an intelligent crowd: the thickness of a cardboard box is not in any way sufficient to protect any goods more valuable than a book/DVD/video game/CD jewel case[0] during shipping, let alone fragile goods. You need to make sure that you buy a box that's big enough to hold whatever you're sending, plus all the padding you're going to pack all around it to prevent it from being damaged by knocks or being dropped. This will add to the weight and size of your package, and therefore the cost of shipping, but it's worth it to ensure your goods arrive undamaged at their destination. </thatguymode> [0] Even this one is debatable given how easy these are to crack and prone they are to the hinge tabs snapping off. The CD jewel case is a wildly successful design but not, I would argue, a great design - certainly not a great design for the particularly brittle plastic they're made out of. Ironic considering the discs themselves are made out of polycarbonate, and are therefore fairly durable.

mmastrac 6y ago
Ugh, I had so many jewel cases break in so many ways: - cracked case - cracked hinge - those teeth break off
andreareina 6y ago
When I was embedded in that world, the rule was that whatever was inside had to survive being dropped a few (3?) feet.

chmod775 6y ago

> As for the corporate dimension, I was aware that standard FedEx boxes are SSCC coded (serial shipping container code), a code that is held by FedEx and excludes other shippers from registering a box with the same dimensions. I wonder if this is true, because if so it would be a particularly ridiculous example of "intellectual property". Anecdotally I have read a few of these art PR-pieces where such details were made up.